


Tainted

by jenny_of_oldstones



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M, Rivalmance (Dragon Age), Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 06:28:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21405682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_of_oldstones/pseuds/jenny_of_oldstones
Summary: Alistair wasn’t sure how he found himself in the arms of such a hateful woman—a woman who disgraced the name of the Grey Wardens, who defiled Andraste’s sacred ashes, who suggested in a dull voice that they should let Arl Eamon die—but he had. Maybe it was an indication of his loneliness, or foolishness.He only knew for certain that, for the first time in his life, he understood what the Revered Mothers meant when they spoke of temptation.
Relationships: Alistair/Female Mahariel (Dragon Age), Alistair/Female Warden (Dragon Age), Alistair/Mahariel
Comments: 6
Kudos: 31





	Tainted

The first time it happened was an accident. They had emerged from Orzammar bloodied and battered and haunted by memories of the army of darkspawn they had seen beneath the earth. Alistair had walked with his eyes downcast from the sunlight, unable to believe that something so vital, so life-giving, could exist in the same world as the Broodmother and the violated bodies birthed from her rotting bulk.

Mahariel was also quiet, devoid of the barbs she usually directed at him. Black blood had dried in streaks on her neck, and she looked around at the trees and flowers with lost, confused eyes.

“Perhaps,” said Morigan behind them, in a weary voice, “we should make camp.”

Their party set to their chores if in a trance. After five minutes of attempting to pitch his tent with fumbling hands, Alistair said that he was going down to the river to bathe. He threw his gear down in a filthy heap, not looking at anyone as he followed the sound of water through the trees.

He removed his clothes and stood on the bank. His chest was choked with an emotion that had nowhere to go. He wished he had tears, or rage, or anything to give it release. All he had was himself and the knowledge of how small he was in the face of the Blight.

_Does the Maker truly hate us so much?_ he thought. 

He heard splashing, and lifted his head to find Mahariel not twenty feet downstream. If she had been there all along or had just arrived, he couldn’t say. She was naked, and her armor lay in a heap on the grass beside her.

Alistair had never seen her undressed before. He had, to his embarrassment, seen Leliana and Zevran and even Sten bathe openly, but the Dalish woman had hidden her nakedness bitterly. 

He couldn't see why, she seemed entirely ordinary. She was skinny, all ribs and elbows and knees. Her red hair, unbound, fell below her waist. There was a nest of red hair between her legs, and her breasts were small, the left drooping a little more than the other. She was as knobby and hard as an gnarled root, and was covered all over in scars.

She blinked at him, and for the first time since they met, Alistair swore they felt the same thing.

Beneath her flesh the taint crawled through her blood, the same as it did his. Her body ached as his ached—as raw as an exposed nerve after so many weeks in the Deep Roads attuned to the Archdemon’s song.

Blood rushed hot to his groin. A groan escaped his lips. He ached because he was alive. He ached because the world was drowning in darkness. He ached because the Maker despised them and the world was more cruel than he had ever imagined.

Before he could stop himself he was gathering her in his arms. She parted her lips for his, and together they burned.

Nothing had prepared him for this. No one had ever explained to him how to make love to a woman. For all the countless lewd stories he overhead in the Warden barracks, there had never been specifics about what to do. He clasped her to him, his hands squeezing and touching everything. Her nipples grew hard against his chest, and he moaned.

"Down," she said.

He obeyed. They all but fell on the grass and she pulled him on top of her. If her body had been a wonder pressed against him, it was nothing compared to the heaven of her legs wrapping around him. His cock brushed against the wetness between her thighs, and he began to weep.

If she minded, she did not show it. As ever, she was quick, hard, efficient. She reached between them and grasped him in her calloused hand. He could have let her hold him like that forever, until she pressed the tip of him inside her.

“Wait,” he gasped. Guilt and shame roared up within him. “It’s wrong, we can’t.”

“You think your Maker cares about this?” She squeezed him. “After everything we saw, you still think he cares about you at all?”

He drew deep lungfuls of air. Hot and cold washed inside him like a fever, desire clashing with years of Chantry upbringing that said this woman was damned beyond all hope. She made a sound of annoyance, then softened slightly and touched his face.

“I spit on gods that stand between me and this. We’re already dead. There is nothing left to fear.”

He sniffed. It was such blasphemy, but the universe had never felt as hollow as it did now, and he clung to it. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“Then don’t be,” she whispered, and, as if leading a stubborn dog to its meal, pressed his cock inside her.

Maybe it was his imagination, but there was something tender in the touch, the drawing together of their pieces into a whole. She spread her legs so that he had room to move, and his body did the rest. His hips moved of their own accord, and his tongue found her breasts, and his tired soul sought out something older and baser than himself.

It was the most exquisite torture he had ever experienced in his life.

He plunged again and again between her sweet folds, and each time she gave a little gasp that made him want to die. He suckled at her breasts as if they might save him from the nightmares, and she raked her nails down his back and whispered to him in broken elvish, “Ma vhenan, oh, emma lath, oh, my sweet one, yes, please, want you there, _there, there, there._” They were so wrapped around each other he couldn’t tell where she began and he ended, only that there was tight heat around him, enveloping him, milking him in a way that pointed the way out of the darkness back to life. He came with a broken sound that split him in two and pushed himself inside as deep as he could go, until stars overtook his vision.

Slowly, he returned to himself.

The night air was sticky on his skin. Mosquitos whined in his ears. The smell of gore on her unwashed body made his stomach turn. He jerked up, ignoring her confused face as he got to his feet.

“This didn’t happen.” He was surprised at the coldness of his voice. “It doesn’t count.”

“Doesn’t count?” she said. “Doesn’t count for what?”

“Doesn’t count as a….” He wanted to say, "as a first time," but he could just imagine the sneer she would give him. “You’re not even Andrastian. It doesn’t….You tricked me.”

She blinked hard. His seed glistened in the red-gold hair between her legs, and he jerked his head away. “We’re Wardens.”

“You think Wardens don’t do this?” she asked.

“Not this Warden.” His eyes stung with tears. Maker, if Duncan could see him now, rolling in the grass with the woman who spoiled Andraste’s ashes, kissing the woman who cursed his name and had to be persuaded week after week to stay and fight the Blight. What had he done?

It suddenly made sense why the Maker had cursed the world with darkspawn.

“You’re not going to finish me?” she said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

It was her turn to give him a cold look. She wrapped her arms around her legs and looked away, back out at the river and the sun setting over it.

“Do you need help walking?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Fine.” He turned on his heel and began to dress. He left her there, returning to camp without a word or a glance back.

That night, he regretted not bathing. The sweat of their bodies had turned the ichor on his flesh into congealed slime. He reeked of the taint, and of her.

_This will never happen again,_ he thought. His first time was meant to be with someone worthy of him, someone tender and gentle and good. This was merely a mistake, and like a mistake it would be forgotten in the morning.

* * *

The second time happened a week later. They had survived an ambush on the road, and after dragging the bodies into a ditch had decided to retire early. Zevran and Oghren scouted ahead and returned of news of a clearing. They circled Bodahn’s wagons around it, and he and Mahariel left to gather firewood.

He wasn’t sure how it happened. One moment they were picking up wood in silence, the next she was near him, her long braid sliding off her shoulder and brushing against his face. It irritated him, and he told her so.

“Then go pick up sticks over there,” she snapped. She grabbed a twig he was reaching for and added it to her pile.

“I was over here first." He used his shoulder to block her from picking up a stick. “Shouldn’t you be using that ghost wolf of yours to be checking the woods for more bandits?”

“I can only do that once a day,” she said. “Where have you been for the past few months?”

“Not trying to run away every time the sun comes up,” he murmured.

She threw down her wood pile. Her hand slapped across his face.

“Is that all you do?” He threw down his own pile. “Hit people when they make you angry? Go around tearing the world apart because you hate it?”

“It’s easier than you think when the world actually hates you, shemlen,” She came at him with her nails and he grabbed her wrists. They struggled together, her wedging a knee between his legs to try and tip him off balance, him trying to bruise, when, with no discernable link between one moment and the next, his lips were on hers. 

_I’m drunk_, he thought, as they pushed against each other, now with far different intent, _or this is a vivid hallucination._

Their clothes came away. Soon she was on her hands and knees, one trouser leg tangled around her left boot. Alistair panted, holding her hips, watching in horrified triumph as his cock emerged from her wet and glistening and plunged back in again, and again, and again.

_It feels so good,_ he thought, helplessly. _Maker, if it’s so wrong, why does it feel so good?_

Something strange happened then. Mahariel’s cries grew louder. She whined, her fingers curling in the grass, and Alistair felt her body _squeeze_ him. Flesh pulsed around him, a hot throb that drew him deeper, and he came hard, his hips clinging as tightly as they could to her ass.

“Aha!”

They both jumped. Zevran leaned against a tree. Dog sat next to him, his head tilting with a whine.

“We were wondering why it was taking so long to gather firewood,” said Zevran. “Sten owes me a sovereign.”

His eyes roamed shamelessly over both of them. Mahariel leapt to her feet and began to gather her clothes.

“It’s not—this isn’t—” Alistair’s face burned red.

“It isn’t?” said Zevran. “You simply tripped and fell?”

Alistair grabbed his smallclothes and tugged them on. He tried to get his breeches on as fast as possible, and only ended up hopping around the meadow on one foot.

Zevran laughed. “Do not be modest on my account!”

Alistair finally managed to shove his leg all the way through. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“Alas, you are right in that regard. Though, if you are planning an encore—”

“Off!” Alistair hurled a twig at him, and Zevran sidled back to camp laughing, the Dog at his heels.

Alistair turned to find Mahariel already dressed. She was picking up her fallen woodpile, her mouth set in a hard line.

“Mahariel—” He wasn’t sure what to say. “This can’t keep happening. It isn’t—it isn’t right.”

She didn’t respond.

“We can’t get distracted by this. There’s too much at stake and it shames us both.”

“Is that why you keep sticking your cock in me?”

Anger flashed inside him. “You were the one who seduced me!”

She rounded on him. “Is that what you tell yourself? That you’re innocent and I’m guilty? Is that how you see everything?”

“Given what a foul, hateful bitch you are, yes, why not.”

“And you were just balls deep in a foul, hateful bitch, so what does that make you?” she said. “Other than a coward who can’t even stand up for himself and shirks responsibility in everything.”

“You defiled Andraste’s ashes with dragon blood,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve lost the right to judge anyone.”

“After what the Chantry has done to my people, you should be glad I didn’t piss in her ashes!” said Mahariel. “What would you have preferred, Alistair? That we fight an army of cultists and their pet dragon? The cultists weren’t going to let us out of that valley if we didn’t do what they wanted. I bought our lives, and all it cost us was a pot full of a dead woman’s ashes.”

Alistair blinked. Mahariel had never explained herself before. She rarely seemed to think she needed to explain herself to anyone.

“Well, you killed Connor,” he said. “A little boy.”

“I killed one boy to save a village. If you hate me so much for making that choice, then maybe you shouldn’t have stood by and watched me slit his throat.”

Alistair had no answer for that.

“The world is evil, and we do evil things to survive,” she said. “But don’t pretend that you’re not just as stained as me. You’ve stood back and let me do everything you despise.” She spat at his feet, and to his horror, he saw tears in her eyes. “Such a man.” 

Her braid slapped him across the cheek as she turned and stormed back to camp. He wanted to think of something sarcastic or clever to hurl after her, but nothing came to him.

How had it come to this? Duncan was dead, the Wardens were dead, and the world was ending. He had always dreamed of love, and instead he found himself debased by lust.

As he gathered up the firewood, he caught sight of the crushed grass where he and Mahariel had wrapped around each other. He had always disliked her because he assumed she was heartless; now he wondered if she was suffering just as he was suffering, only worse, because she was the leader. What did it mean then that he followed her?

_Only that we’re both monster_s, he thought, _and that the Maker hates us both_. 

* * *

The third time happened in Denerim.

They had been busying themselves in the city all week, hunting down evidence that might turn the landsmeet against Loghain.

After a hard day of searching for some nobleman's kidnapped son, they had found themselves back at the tavern. Oghren was holding a drinking contest with Zevran, while Sten looked on impassively. Morrigan was up in her room, doing Maker knew what, and Alistair sat alone in a corner, peering into a tankard of brown ale.

It was moments like this that he missed Wynne and Leliana. Both women had abandoned them after the mess that had happened at the Temple of Sacred Ashes. He had considered abandoning the group back then too, but his duty to the Wardens had held him in place.

Mahariel did not seem sorry to see them leave. She did not seem terribly surprised when people left her, or betrayed her, or treated her like a wicked heathen. She had been brought to Ostagar slung over Duncan’s horse like a sack of grain and had not stopped glaring at everyone since. Not once had she shown gratitude for Duncan having saved her life, though Alistair supposed she could have very well died at the Joining, and it’s not as if the life he had given her was an easy one.

She had been given the worst lot in the world, and somehow managed to win the allegiance of four armies despite it.

Alistair glanced over to where Mahariel stood in dark corner. A man was flirting with her—badly, from the slight smirk on her face. Her eyes suddenly met his, and her smirk curdled into a frown. She grabbed the man’s hand and dragged him out the tavern’s back door.

Alistair took a swig of ale. They had not touched each other since that day in the woods. There had been moments, little sparks of electricity, but always doused by the heavy cloud between them. He would lie awake each night in his cot with his fist around himself and remember the heaven of her cunt around him. She lay not ten feet away, and he jerked himself off alone in a cold tent.

He was beginning to wonder if he was the insane one.

The world was on fire, and they could all die well before ever seeing the Archdemon. He had seen so many horrors since Ostagar. Everything was harder, lonelier, and uglier than he had ever imagined, and for some reason he was determined to…what? Pretend he was better than Mahariel? After he had stood and watched her do every horrible thing she had done? When the same taint flowed in their veins?

He slammed the tankard on the table and stumbled his way through the crowd to the back door of the tavern.

The alleyway outside reeked of piss and vomit. He felt his way along the wall until he saw two shapes moving in the dark.

Mahariel was pressed against a wall, her breeches around her feet and her shirt unlaced. The man from the tavern was kissing her neck, his hands kneading her breasts while he sawed his cock against her thigh.

Alistair yanked him off her.

The man yelped and caught himself on the wall of the opposite building. Mahariel started to cover herself, then narrowed her eyes when she saw who it was.

“Get lost,” said Alistair to the man.

“You have no right,” said Mahariel.

“Yeah,” slurred the man. He was struggling to regain his feet. “What she said.”

Alistair gave him a kick in the ribs. The man let out a yelp, and without further fight pulled his trousers up and made a dash down the alley.

Mahariel stood there with her arms folded over her chest, glaring at him. Alistiar couldn’t help but chuckle.

“I’m sorry, I just can’t take you seriously when your drawers are around your ankles.”

“I should geld you.” Her tone was flat enough that for a moment he thought she might actually be serious.

“I think I owe you an apology,” said Alistair.

“And you thought now was the time to do it?” said Mahariel.

“Yes, because if I don’t do it now then I’ll never do it when I’m sober. I just wanted to tell you that you were right: it’s not fair for me to judge you. I don’t agree with everything you’ve done, I hate most of the things you’ve done, but I let you make those choices so that I wouldn’t have to. So, I’m sorry.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. The alley truly reeked, and he was starting to feel a little nauseous from the ale. Mahariel regarded him with her solemn tattooed face.

“I didn’t think you had it in you,” she said.

“Yes, well, you don’t make it easy.”

“No,” she agreed. “I don’t.”

“And as long as we’re getting everything out into the clear, I’m sorry about what I said when…you know. When we first…”

“Fucked?”

“Yes. I treated you poorly, when truth be told that was the happiest I’ve felt in I don’t even know how long. It was nice.”

Mahariel seemed to shrink slightly. If he didn’t know any better, she was blushing.

“Aye,” she said at last. “It was nice.”

“You could try apologizing, too.”

Her eyes snapped back to him. “For what?”

“For being a massive bitch for one. For pushing me in the dirt that day after Ostagar, for threatening the Chantry mother in Lothering—”

“She deserved it.”

“—for sleeping with that Dalish boy and breaking up his engagement, letting that blood mage out of the dungeon—”

She grabbed him and reeled him in. His hands went under her shirt, and her hands unbuckled his belt. He was soon in the same spot the drunk man had been minutes before, kissing her throat while he played with her breasts. He groaned as her hands led him inside.

It wasn’t what he had wanted for himself. He had never envisioned being the kind of man who fucked a woman behind a tavern, but it seemed less shameful now. He was attainted, and there was little he could do for it. They were all they had, and it would have to be enough.

It was enough.


End file.
